I want to inspire you to reach farther. Most teachers are limited to their classroom, or to the environment within which they and their students can interact. Some may be fortunate enough to escape from the classroom to lead outdoor education trips, or work within a forest school, spending class time exploring and learning from their surroundings. Some teachers are even lucky enough to conduct a comparative studies trip in a foreign country. Most teachers though, usually find themselves trapped within the four walls of the classroom or lecture hall for much of their working week. And yet with the new social media tools, we can all be worldwide educators. All we need is something important to say, and a tool such as this blog as a vehicle to say it with. It never ceased to amaze me how many students contact me to say how much they enjoy reading this blog. Some have told me how much it has inspired them to learn more, explore, take risks, and reach further.

This kind of positive affrirmation is very important to me and to other edubloggers. Personally, it's one of the main reasons I continue to blog and invest my time in it. Knowing that what I'm writing, and the richness of the subsequent dialogue are having a such positive impact on someone, is one of the main reasons I blog so regularly. This morning I happened to stumble upon an interesting Twitter stream hashtag - #qaz11 - which I quickly realised was being generated by a group of students in the care of my old friend Jose Luis Garcia (well worth following him on Twitter: @JL3001, over at the University of Cantabria in Spain. Although the tweets were in Spanish, I was able to translate them using Tweetdeck, and I followed for a little while. The students were discussing the merits of the 10 Teaching with Twitter activities I posted on this blog. It was interesting to see them analyse and evaluate the potential of each of the activities within their own professional context as trainee teachers. Without me actually being there, my thoughts were having an impact on the students' learning - my ideas were helping them to frame their thinking, promote discussion and engage critically with the topic. The same is happening all over the world, every hour, every day as teachers begin to share their ideas and advice, best practice and top tips across a global platform - the blog. We have become a new breed of teacher Quite literally, we are worldwide educators, with students in every country of the world, who read our blogs, think, argue, learn and then go off to try out some ideas. We don't always see them, and we may never meet them, but they are there, and they are learning. So don't limit yourself to seeing the four walls of your classroom as the full extent of your world. Reach further - and become a worldwide educator. You have the technology. Multi-media brought the world into your classroom. Social media will take your classroom into the world.

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Games are doing a really good job for providing learning with a lot of choices.

2. It is what Amazon.com would do if they had your job.

Games customize your environments based on your profile or levels you are on a game.

It is just like the customization of Amazon.com in which you are provided with customized information about books and other products you are interested in based on your profile or your purchasing experiences.

3. There are no next buttons

There are 2 reasons that learners hate next buttons. The first reason is that it forces learners to be linear for thinking. It is like do this and this and this. Secondly, next buttons overuse context with too many materials for learners to read and do.

4. Cognitive psychologists dig it

The best instruction hovers at the boundary of a learner's competency (by Andy Disessa at Berkley graduate school of education).

<Zone of Proximal Development>

5. Sometimes it is good to fail

If you want to succeed, double your failure rate (by Thomas Watson, the founder of IBM).

6. Games immerse learners in context

For example, games do this. With this kind of games, learners know what to do and how to make it complete.

7. Get rid of learners once and for all

8. Games make data sexy

9. Nobody ever wanted to stay up until 2AM just to take your CBT one more time before going to bed.

Games are more fun and have surprises, collaboration, and most importantly mastery. If you master something, you would feel fun.

In other words, with games, 'Learning is the drug.' (by Raph Koster 'Theory of fun)

In short, there is no learning objective that can't be made into a great game.

But traditional online courses, there is no learning objective that can't be ruined by turning it into a 'nexter'.

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This article is a research project by Dave Comier, George Siemens, et al and

deals with Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs), which means that all knowledge

and information may be done and shared on and online basis.

These videos tell you more about MOOCs.

Sometime in June Sandy McAuley, Bonnie Stewart, George Siemens and I decided to apply to SSHRC for funding for researching the place of MOOCs in the digital economy. We did a little work creating videos to allow people to understand what was going on in a MOOC and decide if it was something they might want to do.

We also did a huge write up that you might find interesting

The MOOC Model for Digital Practice responds to the “Building Digital Skills for Tomorrow” section of the consultation paper Improving Canada’s Digital Advantage: Strategies for Sustainable Prosperity by synthesizing the current state of knowledge about Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs).

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Many tasks, roles, and tools are required to design and develop robust,

effective e-learning.

By Mark Steiner

Today’s wide blend of technologies enables an extraordinary range of cognitive, affective, and social enhancements of learning capabilities. Advances in collaborative learning and experiential simulation enable a variety of guided and inquiry-based learning that cross the barriers of distance and time. Through a mixture of instructional media, learners and educators can experience synchronous and asynchronous interactions.

This article focuses primarily on asynchronous learning, specifically constructing self-paced e-learning courses, though these strategies could be applied to a variety of learning design and development situations. Designing and developing robust, effective e-learning is not easy. Many tasks, roles, and tools are required to complete the process successfully. Here are 10 of the fundamentals critical to success.

Educate the client on the fundamentals of e-learning. Regardless of a client’s level of e-learning awareness or sophistication, an educational process must occur. This is true whether it is an internal or external client. Even among experienced professionals within this industry, individuals undoubtedly have varying nomenclature regarding roles, processes, and tools. It is essential to educate your client on roles, processes, tools, options, costs, feasibility, and consequences to ensure all parties are operating on similar assumptions and guidelines. You and your client should approach the endeavor as a partnership. Assist your client in realizing what an integral part it is to the process. Build trust with your client by providing it with sensible, honest, pragmatic expertise. However, don’t be afraid to exert control and don’t be afraid to say no. Remember it’s your responsibility to set and control the client’s expectations.

Determine the actualtraining need or gap. If training is not the solution to the problem, you are guaranteed to fail. It is doubtful either you or your client desire such an outcome. To help ensure determination of the actual deficiency, perform a thorough analysis, working closely with your client. Begin your analysis with what your client thinks is wrong, then dig deeper, utilizing your previous experiences, education, and intuition. There are a variety of resources that can assist individuals and organizations in enhancing and strengthening their analysis process.

Define your process and communicate it, focusing on key review points in the cycle. The design and development of e-learning is often a complicated collision of ideas, tools, roles, people, technology, and desired outcomes. You and your client want predictable results. A well-defined, reliable process is the clearest way to get the desired results. What activities are to occur? When will they occur? Which ones must be completed before other activities can begin? It is important to make your client aware of its responsibilities: specifically inputs, review cycles, and corresponding impacts

Mark Steiner is president of learning solutions firm mark steiner, inc. Visitwww.marksteinerinc.com for more information.

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These wiki sites are best recommended wikis in terms of compatibility, functionality,

and easiness. Wiki is the most collaborative site especially for education settings.

Best Free Online Wiki

For several weeks I have explored and shared both the Enjoyable and Disappointing of free, online wikis from the most popular to a couple of up-and-comers.

These highlights have consisted of the positives as well as negatives, the latter of which will hopefully be addressed by each respective wiki.

Wikia’s To Do

Reducing the sense of information overload and page clutter, will go a long way toward improving the overall Wikia User eXperience (UX). With so many choices, so much content, numerous ads, and an incoherent visual flow, one is forced to spend an inordinate amount of time scanning pages to find desired actions and navigation choices.

Wetpaint’s To Do

Wetpaint presents a very well refined and enjoyable User eXperience (UX) with the need to smooth out some rough edges

PBwiki’s To Do

PBwiki provides robust functionality for both editing wiki pages as well viewing those changes.

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E-learning is the education system that people can't ignore or should keep up with

at the 21st century for their lifelong education.

Nowadays, the term, Distributed Learning System, is more used than e-learning.

It is because distributed learning has much wider range of meaning.

One of the basic tenets of adult learning is that learning needs to take place at the time that the knowledge is required.

In today’s business climate, the performance of your people is a critical differentiator for your business’ success. When change is the only constant, your organization must establish a baseline of competency and skills among your workforce.

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The Reusable Learning project received initial funding from the National Science Foundation in Fall 2003 as part of the National Science Digital Library initiative (NSF DUE-0333590). The project will conclude in Fall 2005. The objectives of the project are to:
Develop Reusable Design Guidelines intended for content authors and digital repository managers. They provide a set of specific actions that can be taken in five areas to improve the reusability of digital learning resources. These guidelines, and other resources developed by the project, synthesize the body of research and practice that has built up in this domain.
Developing recommendations on how collections can expose reusable content in searches.
Disseminate these guidelines and recommendations, and train NSDL project participants on their use, through a series of workshops, and through the development of this web site and other resources.
All resources produced by this project are applicable to the entire educational community.
The following topics provide an introduction to the concepts of reusability, and the factors affecting reusability:
The Case for Reusability
What, How and by Whom
Introduction to Reusable Design
Factors Affecting Reusability
Granularity (or aggregation level)